


Without Moonlight

by Temaris



Category: The Blue Castle
Genre: Angst, F/M, Yuletide 2004
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-13
Updated: 2010-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-11 19:12:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/115958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Temaris/pseuds/Temaris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barney's night in the Mistawis...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without Moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Lady Mondegreen in the Yuletide 2004 Challenge

Barney Snaith paced, and wondered how the world could be so very contrary. It seemed like a good idea at the time, back when he had been out of money, out of ideas, and out of charity with the whole damn world. He'd had enough. The world, and its obsession with money and society, and _manners_ could go hang. He'd left them behind, stood on his own feet in places so far away that he had amazed himself, seeing things he had thought he would only ever read about.

He'd run to the ends of the earth, telling himself all the while that he wasn't running, he was being a man. Walking away from the empty trappings of a worthless world. _Getting rid of the smell of turpentine_ , a cruel, once loved voice whispered.

He'd not meant to find peace, or a new career. He'd been prepared to ride wild and rough all his days -- but something in the silence as he passed through the world had settled in him. Something of its beauty, the grand indifference and the meticulous patterns informing nature filled up the emptiness, calmed the anger. He'd realised, slowly, that he'd had enough of running. Somewhere along the line he'd stopped running away, and started just walking towards the next horizon, eager to see what lay beyond.

He looked down at the galleys on his desk. For all that, he hadn't learned anything. Pride still held him back, still drove him. He had thought it was still about _things_ , that she wanted a husband, a married life, the right to call herself a wife before she died. Small things, things he could give for a year or so without missing them. And then she would die, and he would be no worse off than before. Perhaps he would have gained something even from this act of kindness.

He wasn't supposed to fall in love.

He looked at the jumble of papers and pictures and felt, for a moment, like savagely sweeping them from the desk. They didn't matter. They hadn't made Valancy love him. Nothing had made her love him but her own love starved nature. If anything they had made him love her. How could one not feel a certain sort of thrill of pride when one's own words were quoted to one, memorised and brought to life in a way that he had only thought possible in the quiet of his own mind, in the heart of Nature's grandeur.

Words. Stupid, worthless, words. They wouldn't save her.

He half turned to go back into the house, and stepped on something. A pen. Mechanically he stooped and scooped it up, threw it on the desk, then pushed the galleys and papers away from him leaving them higgledy-piggledy, not caring where they went.

He turned on his heel and with quick steps walked back into the house.

Valancy was lying in their bed, rigid, her eyes shut. His lips twitched, despite everything. He'd have to remember to show her a better way to fake sleeping some day soon. If there was such a day.

He stripped and crawled into bed. She didn't move, and he draped an arm over his face, pretending to fall asleep too.

Sleep eluded him, just as it eluded the thin little body lying so stiffly beside him. For a moment he had the horrid thought -- what if one day he were to wake, and she were a stiffened corpse, cold, dark eyes closed forever.

He shuddered, and rolled over, slid an arm around her, and even though the warmth and the small sounds of movement told him so, he still felt something painful uncoil when he felt her breathe in. He tugged her closer and he pressed a kiss against her cold skin. Chills ran down his back, and he let her go, even as his body urged him to move closer, take what he could, while he could...

She didn't respond, and he lay there resting against her, thinking into the darkness. Her heart was frail. A sudden shock could kill her at any time. And yet... and yet... Her heart hadn't failed at the switch even though his nearly had.

The hours crawled. As dawn greyed the sky he rose again and dressed. Valancy slept now, restlessly, and he stood watching her for a lifetime. Something in that face, stripped grey and hollow with the dawn shadows, both loosed and bound him.

She looked as though she might die. But how could he go back? Having abandoned it all, how could he return, the penitent prodigal, when nothing had changed?

He took the boat and rowed into the lake, long rhythmic strokes that calmed and steadied him in their very monotony. The mist headed trees hung, green and dark over the Mistawis, untouched by the sun, and looking as though they never could be so touched.

He turned towards one of the small bays on the edge of the lake, dragged the boat up under the bushes, half hidden, and walked.

He'd been walking for a couple of hours, his panic eased by the sunrise and the peace of the woods, when it occurred to him that he had not exchanged one word of reassurance with her. Oh, he'd asked if she felt any the worse for the experience, but then he'd left her alone, left her again this morning. He tried to tell himself that she was a sensible little thing, but worry tugged at him.

He stopped dead, seeing it suddenly, not as getting his head clear, but as running.

Shame pricked at him, and he scowled bitterly. Why break the habits of a lifetime, Redfern? Go on, run away, be the paltry sort of fellow who runs scared at every reverse.

No. No. That wasn't it. He wasn't like that. He wasn't the kind of man who valued his pride over his _wife_? Over the woman he loved?

As he thought it, he knew it for the truth. He loved her. He wasn't leaving, couldn't _leave_.

How simple. How extraordinary.

He swallowed hard, and dropped his head in his hands, standing there, oblivious to the green life springing up around him. This was impossible, hideous. Not a thing in the world could help Valancy, and he couldn't bear for her to die.

That moment, that one awful, unholy moment when he had known she was going to die, and he with her. It fell into place very clearly then, in extremis, that she was not _just_ Valancy. She was everything. And they were reprieved and then...

He was only Barney Snaith, a dubious character lurking on the fringes of legality, hiding on an island far from the fringes of Deerwood. And Deerwood in its turn was a nowhere place, far enough away from Lake Mistawis that the good, stolid souls could not be panicked by the darkling woods and lucent waters.

He was no Redfern, with a magical miracle cure. He'd turned away from that chicanery, and the millions of stinking dollars built on the gullibility of his fellow man. There was no efficacy in such things as dream-driven elixirs, or miracle rubs, or purple potions, or anything else.

He dragged a hand over his face, then drew a deep breath, and walked on. No miracles. God, Valancy. So dear, and funny, and sweet.

Dying.

He twisted his head as though he could escape the thought by not looking. Valancy, dying. The words had always belonged together, and now, with the thought made real, so very nearly real, he found he no longer believed them.

She'd told him -- he closed his eyes and saw her narrow, pinched little face looking at him, calm, resigned courage in her eyes -- that she wanted to marry him. That she had a year, at most. That she loved him.

He couldn't remember why he had said yes. The moment had become one of those strange, blurred memories that were filled with the clear sky, and the heat of the sun, and the sound of birds singing, and empty of anything but snapshots of the moments. Something of pity had moved him, certainly. Some better part of himself rising up and knowing, before he himself knew, that this woman was unlike those he had known, and pitying the grey little spinster and her bright, trampled dreams.

Maybe too, an odd, touched part of his soul, that thought that as Valancy had stood by Cissy Gay until her death, and made her last, lonely days bearable, that perhaps he could at least grant this poor tired girl _her_ only wish. Her last wish. Cissy had wanted to die, and at the last, had looked like she had stepped into joy, the Infinite more kindly and welcoming than any spiteful gossip or reproving matron would have believed.

Valancy didn't want to die. He knew that now. He had thought her resigned to her fate, had pitied her, and lately had wished it might be different, even as he accepted that Fate had laid a cold hand on her shoulder.

So. The beginning and the ending of it all.

The clear white terror of struggling to free her foot from the rails as they shook under their touch with the weight of the engine bearing down on them. Hands slipping over smooth polished leather and tightly knotted laces, desperate tugging. There had been no thought of escape, he'd barely heard her pleas to go, just _go_ , please, Barney... she'd struggled to get away from him, drive him back, white faced, eyes grey with horror that he might die with her...

All he could think, now, as then, was that he _would_ die with her.

And safe from the drama and terror of the railroad, she was still under sentence of death.

He thought of her.

Of Tierney's passion for her face, of his own passion for her face, and the curve of her neck, and the slight lines of her slender, pale body. He'd really let himself believe that he could lie with one woman as easily as another. He'd married her, fully intending to be gentle, but to have his money's worth -- as much as one could with a little grey spinster who stood, if not at death's door, then with her hand pushing at the gate.

And here he was, surprised to find that he loved her, more than the dear friend and companion she had become, or the eager bed-mate, but in every thing, great and small.

He wondered if she would look as white as she had the first time he had seen her. Would she look diminished and frail when she lay in a coffin, with white roses around her, and his pearls about her neck? He slammed his hand into a tree trunk, the pain in his hand nothing to do with his strangled, "No!"

Last time he had felt so broken he'd run far enough that he had thought of never coming back. And that was only for a shining, hollow, girl, empty of honour and charity. Ethel could stomach him for his father's money. Valancy had neither known nor cared. She had known the rumours and gossip, and had not cared. Or if she had cared, cared more for him, and less for his whispered chequered past.

Now, pride didn't matter. Nothing mattered except he'd finally realised that she couldn't die.

Valancy must not die.

They had stared death in the face already, and they had fought and won. They could fight again. They could win, again.

Doctors could be wrong. _Must_ be wrong. Whoever he was that had pronounced that death sentence on his moonlit girl hadn't seen her, warm and welcoming in the twilight; laughing up at him; swimming like a Naiad in the clear waters of the lake, her skin creamy and her eyes bewitching.

He had thought his own heart would stop as he struggled to free her, free them both as the black engine rushed down upon them. He had thought he would never hear another sound over the blood pounding in his skull and the scream of the train's whistle, and the relentless heavy shudder of its wheels on the track, obliterating that pretty little death-trap of a boot. So nearly obliterating his wife and him with her.

He turned away. How could he go back? How could he not? He smiled. He loved her. He was Valancy's husband and whether she wanted it or not, she would see a doctor -- a hundred doctors. Every damn doctor in Canada and Europe besides if none here could give him the right answer. He smiled a little bitterly. Perhaps she could see the Alhambra before--

For Valancy, he would do it. He would swallow his pride, swallow anything. He would go back to Montreal, cap in hand, and beg his father for money, help. Anything.

Anything for Valancy.

He took the boat and rowed swiftly through the wilderness, back to their own blue castle, knowing there was no other choice to make.

* * *

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